Introduction

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) tracks green space availability across U.S. using the ParkScore index to measures how well cities are meeting their residents’ need for public parks based on:

We explore - Yearly trends - The relationship between some features and park rankings/scores - Affect of adjusting for equity in the newest ranking in 2021

Regional patterns

WOULD NOT SHOW UP TO SPEED UP TESTING. REMOVE “EVAL=FALSE” IN THE END

Data cleaning and imputation

Data analysis

Distribution of variables

Variables over the years. Increasing trend in park size, park access, playground scores

Park Scores vs. Features. TPL has different max. scores or feature weight across years. 2020-21 scores are higher across park size, easier accessibility and investment in parks features.

Amenities: (number of) basketball hoops, dog parks, playgrounds. Overall increasing trend in score with better amenities. But plateaus

Top ranking cities across years

Exploring equity in 2021

TPL added 4 features that go into the new equity score : park space ratio and 10-minute walk for low-income and people of color.

Hard to directly compare statistics since they changed weighting methods.

##       [,1] [,2]                  [,3]           
##  [1,] "1"  "Minneapolis"         "Washington"   
##  [2,] "2"  "Washington, D.C."    "St. Paul"     
##  [3,] "3"  "St. Paul"            "Minneapolis"  
##  [4,] "4"  "Arlington, Virginia" "Arlington"    
##  [5,] "5"  "Cincinnati"          "Chicago"      
##  [6,] "6"  "Portland"            "San Francisco"
##  [7,] "7"  "Irvine"              "Irvine"       
##  [8,] "8"  "San Francisco"       "Cincinnati"   
##  [9,] "9"  "Boston"              "Seattle"      
## [10,] "10" "Chicago"             "Portland"

Conclusion

Pay attention to the different scores range/weight across the years

Parks tend to have greater score with larger park size, easier accessibility, higher investment and more facilities.

TPL affected rankings of a lot of cities by including an equity metric in

Find this project at GitHub: https://github.com/pberezina/parks-project